Chrome’s desktop notifications are clean, easy to read, and really handy for keeping an eye on what’s going on inside Gmail without keeping the browser focused on it. Setting it up is easy, grab your copy of Chrome to follow along.

Turn on Desktop Notifications

Before you can take advantage of Chrome’s notification power you’ll have to turn them on. Click on the wrench in the upper right corner and navigation to Options –> Under the Hood –> Content settings… and then from within the Content menu navigate to Notifications. There you should check Ask me when a site wants to show desktop notifications. Close out the options menu and return back to the main browser pane in Chrome.

Enable Notifications within Gmail

Fire up Gmail and navigate to the Settings –> General. Scroll down until you see the Desktop notifications sub-section:

First, click the blue link that says “Click here to enable desktop notifications…”. Your link will likely say “for Gmail”, in our case it says How-To Geek Mail because of our Google Apps domain. When you click it, a blue bar will appear at the top of your browser asking if you want to allow mail.google.com to show desktop notifications. Click Allow.

Toggle the notifications you’d like to receive to on. In this case we’ll toggle email notifications on and take it for a test drive. Don’t forget to scroll down and click Save Changes.

Time to test it out. Fire of an email to the Gmail account you just enabled notifications from (send it from another email address, sometimes you don’t get notifications if you send them from your main address to yourself). Also, make sure you have Gmail open in a tab somewhere in Chrome. This is important; the notifications will only work if you’re actually logged into Gmail with Gmail open in a tab.

Let’s fire off an email and see how it works:

Success! By way of the moon law all your base are now belong to us! (Extra credit points for successfully identifying the two parts of my double obscure reference in the prior sentence.)

Before we go, one last tip; If you find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer number of emails popping up, it might be time to turn on the Priority Inbox.

Jason Fitzpatrick is a warranty-voiding DIYer who spends his days cracking opening cases and wrestling with code so you don't have to. If it can be modded, optimized, repurposed, or torn apart for fun he's interested (and probably already at the workbench taking it apart). You can follow him on Twitter if you'd like.

I’m currently running Digsby, which includes a small application that checks your mail in a set interval and pops up with a fancy little box every time i get a new email. The best thing about it, though, is the inbox-preview that shows up when i click the icon in the system tray, you gotta love that!

It’s too bad it’s boundled with Digsby. If it was seperate, many more would use it.

I think it is worth remembering that Google has a the approach of releasing features and developing them continualy in situ and therefore likely to add functionality as time goes on. It also depends on the build you have but in later Chrome builds it is started as a service I think for Cloud Print and background web apps etc so these kind of notifications could be run as background web apps in the near future.

I don’t need this because in my main OS, Ubuntu, I have an app called Gmail Notifier that is basically an Evolution notification, but I don’t need Evolution running or even have to use it. It uses the same icon and setup.

@Venus Unless of course you are using this on a share or work computer in which case that would be the worst solution. I for one find these notifiers to be very useful at my work computer, however said computer is used by multiple employees so I don’t want it having too much integration into my email.
Chrome + incognito mode makes me feel much better about this.

DID YOU KNOW?

The first worker to die during the construction of the Hoover Damn (J.G. Tierney) was the father of the last person to die during the project (Patrick Tierney, 13 years to the day after his father’s death).